GitHub expands tools for software teams with acquisition of Pull Panda

GitHub has taken over startup Pull Panda for an unknown amount. Pull Panda is a small company that creates collaboration tools for software teams. According to his LinkedIn page, the startup has only one employee: founder Abi Noda.

Pull Panda, founded eighteen months ago, is the creator of three popular tools that simplify an important part of development projects, writes Silicon Angle. These are code reviews. Code reviews are the process of a developer’s colleague reviewing the code before it goes to production to see if any problems have been overlooked. If that process goes fast, the product or service improvement will also go faster.

Pull Panda’s first tool – Pull Assigner – distributes review requests to team members so that no one gets too much work on their plate. The second app is called Pull Remainders and informs users via Slack when they are asked to view a colleague’s code. The third tool is Pull Analytics, which gives team leaders insight into how quickly reviews are completed. The tool also displays related information, such as success levels.

Currently, over a thousand companies use Pull Panda’s products to manage the process. These include WeWork Companies, Pivotal Software and Instacart.

Acquisition of GitHub

As mentioned above, Pull Panda is a fairly small company, which probably means that the transaction is probably also small. Still, the acquisition is a big one for GitHub, because of the frequently used tools. The tools have been merged into a single app that the company has released for free on the GitHub Marketplace. In the long run, the functions of the products must be integrated directly into the platform.

This is the second time that GitHub has bought a company since it was acquired by Microsoft. The other acquisition was Dependabot, which developed an app to alert developers to vulnerabilities in their software. The app is now integrated into GitHub itself.